The young men in business suits, gingerly picking their way among the millwrights, machinists and pipefitters at Kansas City’s Worldwide Grinding Systems steel mill. Gaping up at the cranes that swung 10-foot cast iron buckets through the air. Jumping at the thunder from the melt shop’s electric-arc furnace as it turned scrap metal into lava.

“They looked like a bunch of high school kids to me. A bunch of Wall Street preppies,” says Jim Linson, an electronics repairman who worked at the plant for 40 years. “They came in, they were in awe.”

Apparently they liked what they saw. Soon after, in October 1993, Bain Capital, co-founded by Mitt Romney, became majority shareholder in a steel mill that had been operating since 1888.

It was a gamble. The old mill, renamed GS Technologies, needed expensive updating, and demand for its products was susceptible to cycles in the mining industry and commodities markets.

Less than a decade later, the mill was padlocked and some 750 people lost their jobs. Workers were denied the severance pay and health insurance they’d been promised, and their pension benefits were cut by as much as $400 a month.

What’s more, a federal government insurance agency had to pony up $44 million to bail out the company’s underfunded pension plan. Nevertheless, Bain profited on the deal, receiving $12 million on its $8 million initial investment and at least $4.5 million in consulting fees.

Basically, what Bain Capital did to GS Technologies and their workers is a miniature model of what they want and have been doing to America- extract the resources, enrich themselves, loot the Federal treasury, then tell the people there is no money left and we’re going to have to cut your pensions, your SS, and your medical care while they run off to overseas tax havens to deposit their loot while chanting about job creation and free markets. Bain and Mitt Romney pocketed $8 million for the price of a community, all these workers pay and benefits and pension, and $44 million in federal money.

extract the resources, enrich themselves, loot the Federal treasury, then tell the people there is no money left and we’re going to have to cut your pensions, your SS, and your medical care while they run off to overseas tax havens to deposit their loot while chanting about job creation and free markets.

Glad the media is finally focusing on it. But because some ‘journalist’ from the NYT is publishing a gossipy book about how much the Obama marriage is Michelle yelling at everyone I guess we’re in for a week or two of that crap. Ugh.

But I’ve been told that Obama and Romney are both pawns of the billionaires, and I should overlook things like evil bigotry and economic crankery and support Ron Paul. You know, for Freedom. And silver coins I can use at the Gas ‘N Sip.

As I said in comments here yesterday or the day before, I foresee a general election with a new ad featuring guys like these rolling out every week or two, talking about how much Romney profited on each deal by killing off businesses and jobs and raiding pension funds. Within a couple of months, he won’t be able to go anywhere without being heckled and booed.

That’s a powerful ad. I like the observation that Mitt Romney may create jobs, but not very many of them are in America.

@Hunter Gathers:
Saw my first Ron Paul t-shirt on someone today. Young guy, early to mid-twenties. Looked maybe like he was from a family of Indian immigrants, which got me wondering how ethnically diverse Ron Paul’s followers are. I saw him in a Whole Foods.

What John said plus this: Those millwrights, machinists and pipefitters were making useful things and they got the shaft. Mitt and his nasty crowd have never made any useful thing or performed any useful service. All they have done is destroy companies and people and extract all the money, leaving the husks of factories and communities for us to deal with.

I despise these people in the same way I despise the patent trolls. They are parasites stealing from productive workers and should be taxed and regulated into oblivion.

O dn’t want to go all Karl Marx on everyone, but this is straightforward capitalism without regulation. The “pure” capitalists are their own worst enemies. Given half the chance they will kill the golden goose. The system needs a regulator to survive.

This is what is so wrong with the “regulation stifles growth and economic development” meme.

I’m amazed at how much the general discourse ignores this. Wait. No I’m not.

My father was Chief Engineer for Marion Power Shovel. You might remember them if you look at the transport crawler for SaturnVB and later rockets. Yes, and cranes and shovels from back of your yard to – woa, that’s frickin huge…

A corporate raider started nosing around, so Dad put himself on the market and was gone within a month. Marion’s problem, if you will, was that its assets were worth more than its stock. It didn’t take long for Marion to cease to exist, the remains – mostly the name plate and ownership of patents and drawings were purchased by another company. The jobs – oh well.

Yeah, this happened in the pre-historic era of the later ’60s, you know when the only thing happening was hippies…

I saw somewhere the book was coming out and saw HuffPo (where else, right?) prominently quoting from the book about how Michelle and Rahm tensions, and you can just see how this is going to rivet the village. I see also that is intended to make the Obama inner circle look in disarray when we have seen them and thought of them as super disciplines.

Anyway, it’s good to see this long-overdue framing getting some traction. Low-info conservatives love to glibly recite “Gubbmint should be run like a bidness” like some sort of mystical incantation. The best antidote to this is to show how the MBA/corporate* mindset is what’s actually causing many of our current problems in the first place.

@Violet: The whole youth Ron Paul movement is based on three things: One – a craving for some kind of pseudo-anarchist, ‘fuck the authorities’ rebellion. Two – legal dope. Three, that they would likely be on the front lines should another war pop up explains their agreement with his isolationism. I have spoken to far too many of the Paulistas on campus and I can guarantee that they know precious little about his actual positions, they just want to be able to ‘do whatever they want’ whilst not putting themselves in harms way.

I usually find some vaguely eloquent way to explain that they need to stop being such selfish bastards, and to remember that human beings live in community and thus need to work with one another for the good of said community.

This is the drumbeat that needs to sound from here to November. The company that Romney profited from and STILL profits from is nothing more than a corporate vulture that destroys companies, feeds on their carcasses and sends their jobs overseas, while allowing our government to pick up the bill. Just commit it to memory and spout it every time someone tells you that Romney is the “serious” business candidate.

Wait wait wait. You mean to tell me that there were people that Rahm Emmanuel didn’t get along with? Rahm “that’s fucking retarded” Emmanuel was not, in fact, universally beloved by everyone who came in contact with him?

Well, that’s certainly stop-the-presses news. Who knew that someone almost universally referred to as “abrasive” might get into conflicts with others?

@JPL: saw the summary about the book at HuffPo politics by Sam Stein and some other guy. I walked away feeling it was going to be turned into what you said.
ETA: it’s by Jodi Kantor.
@Mnemosyne: exactly! but if you read the piece they are making it out to be this drama laden thing and the center of it is Michelle. I mean, really?

This election is going to be crazy. I watched an old 2008 GOP primary debate — the one where they all ganged up on Romney. Man, what core he has is cold and nasty. He was just blank eyed lashing at them. He seems like he’s totally dropped that this time around, for now at least, but I think that’s what he is. I think in a strange way he’s the perfect opposite to Obama. (And I think Obama will win. FTR.)

Before going into politics, Obama was a low-paid community-organizer. Before going into politics, Romney was a highly-paid community-demolisher. One of them struggled to build a sense of community amongst the jobless and the hopeless, the other made big bucks bringing joblessness, hoplessness and despair to previously viable communities.

Quick shout out: Andy Sullivan, one of the co-authors of the article, is my cousin. He’s also the front man for Dirty Bomb, which recently wrote a rock opera about Jack Abramoff, and is a wicked awesome dude.

Initially, she had considered postponing her move to the White House for months; after arriving, she bristled at its confinements and obligations — unable to walk her dog without risking being photographed, and monitored by her husband’s aides for everything from how she decorated the family’s private quarters to whether she took makeup artists on overseas trips.

@JPL: I see that the NYT article is a little more subtle while the HuffPo piece is really out to make this all about a drama queen with expensive tastes and out of pace with political pros. You can see how it’s going to be reported

ETA yes that part makes no sense to me. I just think this is going to play very badly in the way the Village will just make Michelle out to be a witch

@Canuckistani Tom:
Considerably more than tracks, Dad still has the plaque from SAE for design excellence for the tallest (by a huge margin) self-erecting mobile truck crane. Walking draglines are not technically tracked vehicles and are the biggest. At about 9yrs I got to run a dragline, operator’s hands on controls – of course.

The world’s largest mobile land structure is the transporter. That thing was fascinating to be a detatched part of and its scale amazed (beyond real expression) a kid.

The Wiki could use some fixing, but I’m not interested enough to do all the documentation.

he particularly wanted to help sell the health care overhaul in spring 2009. “Figure out how to use me effectively,” she told her aides, “this is my priority.” But West Wing advisers, recalling the public resentment of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s involvement in health care as first lady, mostly declined her offer.

then two paragraphs down

Michelle Obama never wanted to be the kind of first lady who interfered with West Wing business, she told her aides. It was her husband’s administration, not hers, she sometimes said. She had little appetite or expertise for policy detail, and she knew the history of first ladies — like Nancy Reagan and Mrs. Clinton — who had been deemed meddlers, unelected figures who wielded unearned power.

@JPL: I don’t see how it couldn’t be both. Also-too, the senior advisers – were they actually aware that Hillary was doing more than just “selling” that legislation? Michelle seems to be talking about selling it to the public, not actually lobbying and sitting on the committee writing it.

When there was all the fuss about Bo (they should have gotten a shelter dog!) there was an article I wish had gotten more coverage. It was with the dog breeder.

She related that she had no qualms about his placement because the First Lady stated that she knew her girls meant well, but the bottom line was that Mom would be the one to make sure his needs were met. “So,” Michelle asked. “What does he need?”

@Suffern ACE: After reading the NYTimes, I’m sure her enemies will make it more negative and the media will play along with it. Remember when she said she had never been so proud of America and the media made it sound like she didn’t like America before. That’s a valid concern I have.

Corporate raiders are nothing new and the only real defense a company that wants to continue to exist has is to start buying its own stock to drive its price up. If it is upside down in stock value/assets, that’s gonna be real difficult to do. Being upside down in that respect isn’t a business problem, depending on the business, but it does mean raiders are gonna swarm.

Something like MPS operates in a low margin, low production number, high labor, high infrastructure, high end product evironment. It isn’t sexy as a stock and what it takes to do business means you’ll have huge assets.

@JPL: The article looks poorly sourced, too — only a couple of aides on record, and none of them close enough friends to be saying much, with the close friends mostly saying, “Well, turns out, living in the White House with everyone monitoring your every move and discussing your weight, your clothing and whether or not you ate a freaking hamburger is stressful as hell. Who knew?”

As far as unhappy First Ladies go, Betty Ford ended up an alcoholic, Jackie Kennedy and Mary Lincoln had to watch their husbands get assassinated, and Mary Appleton Pierce went into a deep depression and hid in the upper rooms of the White House, never coming out (to be fair that was in reaction to the death of her child.) Michelle Obama has nothing on this so far.

I don’t think these guys would be as mad if they learned that Mitt pays a lower percentage in taxes than they do. It warms peoples’ hearts when job creators are richly rewarded. It’s what makes this country great.

FLOTUS is a sweet gig only if you’re slightly dim. It drove Rosalynn Carter nuts, IIRC.

Heck, living in that fever swamp (literal as well as metaphorical) damn near killed poor Abigail Adams, and from what I’ve been able to gather Martha Washington couldn’t wait to get out of there, either. Apart from possibly Dolly Madison, the only women who seemed to have enjoyed being FLOTUS are the Marie Antoinette types — Julia Grant, Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan…

I read the NYT piece(I refuse to give HuffPo the hit), which is contradictory in places, and it wasn’t that bad. Bristling at the confinement of the White House and advocating for your spouse seems like a natural reaction to me.

Sure, the author is a soulless hack, who will sensationalize things for better sales, but Michelle is popular, and people like her. I don’t see this hurting her.

So republicans are finally gonna go all in and nominate Gordon Gecko for president? Gutsy move! But why are they going for a boring, mormonized version of Gordon Gecko? He’s lacking all the bad boy charisma of the original.

@Valdivia: I read the NYT article. It was gossipy, for sure. But really, if the worst they can say is that she is fiercely supportive of her husband and upset when things aren’t going well, well, I don’t think that’s too bad.

Anyone who already likes MIchelle will be fine knowing she’s not perfect. And anybody who already has a negative opinion, well they will run with this, but they already had a negative position.

Now if the article said she was lazy and never worked out and she ate cheeseburgers and fries every day in private while she talked about eating right, well, I think that could damage her.

The article, while not particularly flattering, doesn’t say anything about Michelle that I find out of character. It is kind of surprising, though, that everybody would gossip like that about the president. About his wife, no less! I am willing to bet that he is not happy about that.

I despise these people in the same way I despise the patent trolls. They are parasites stealing from productive workers and should be taxed and regulated into oblivion.

Part of the problem is that the practical threshold for what the examiners at the US Patent and Trademark Office consider a patentable advancement over known prior art in a given field, including what is sufficiently a sufficiently “nonobvious” variation on existing art, is shockingly low. Most examiners have such an overburdened incoming caseload of applications that they often lack the time to adequately research or consider what’s known and obvious and what’s not in a particular field, especially outside their narrow range of concentration. Though I’ve lost the patent number citation, there actually are a couple of patents that have issued for engines which amount to classic perpetual motion machines (which are supposedly unpatentable); that’s just the most blatant example of sloppily considered patent examinations.

Also, there’s the nearly incomprehensible writing style in which patents are couched. Have you ever tried to read a patent on even a fairly simple-seeming device? Have you ever tried to research patents in a given area of technology? The Patent Office regulations governing the longstanding style in which patents MUST be written is monstrously, needlessly convoluted and arcane, completely independent of the degree of complexity of the technological invention itself. The rules purportedly are to promote crisply clear delineation and understanding of what the claimed patentable elements of the invention are, but instead create such a mess of dense, tangled syntax that it is impossible for most people who are not experienced patent attorneys to intelligently wade through it, and the extent of the patent depends far more on how clever the drafter is in finely nuancing his wording than on the extent to which the technology represented actually represents meaningful innovation.

I speak as someone who initially thought this would be an exciting area of law to practice with my degrees in computer science and electrical engineering, and I actually practiced for a year with a patent law firm and passed the PTO patent bar exam (which is extremely difficult, picayune, and hypertechnical). However, I realized this wasn’t for me, and I preferred writing software to the deadly dull writing and parsing of patent applications. Yecch!

@Valdivia: I read the article and she doesn’t come off angry, just insistent. In fact, she comes off as very progressive and not really interested in bullshit politics. It’s a lot better than you’d think.

I’ve been sort of studying Mitt. He makes these weird “mistakes” — to the Des Moines Register board he was talking about how sucky Iowa weather is and pining away for Palm Springs (!). At an Iowa town hall in a factory, where the audience was working people, he started his comments by saying, “This looks like the company Ann’s father owned.” The thing about his being heh heh “unemployed.”

Anyway, I don’t think these things are mistakes really — I think he does that stuff to establish the power relationship. Intentionally or not, he’s reminding people, constantly, that he’s better, above them, and, I guess, that they should listen to him. Fits well with the ‘big swinging dick’ business world he came out of.

Romney left Bain Capital in February 1999 to serve as the President and CEO of the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games Organizing Committee, which he then promptly saved from bankruptcy. This guy was let go in 2001, after Romney left.

I guess the lesson from this story is that the world needs more people like Mitt Romney- if we could have cloned him and kept him in charge of Bain, this guy wouldn’t have lost his job. Thankfully Romney is here to save America from bankruptcy.

Thanks for bringing up this story- I never previously realized how amazing Mitt actually is.

I like Michelle, and I don’t think the article was too bad or dems in disarray or whatever. Those aides all have their own axes to grind, whatever. Michelle didn’t come off poorly at all IMO if you actually read the whole piece at the nytimes site.

Rahm, Gibbs and Jarret however come across as the jerkoffs that they are, and the anonymous aides they quoted for the most part are petty little tools.

I wonder how much of Obama’s recent displays of backbone are due to Michelle? More credit to her if that’s the case.

Sometimes I wish Michelle was president, but then I always wanted Elizabeth Edwards to run too because she was awesome.

But I’ve been told that Obama and Romney are both pawns of the billionaires, and I should overlook things like evil bigotry and economic crankery and support Ron Paul. unelectability and write in Elizabeth Warren for president when you vote in November 2012. You know, for Freedom.

@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: More amusing: Mitt’s dad made a go of it running American Motors. I’d love to sell popcorn to the time travel movie where Mitt and Bain Capital get into the position to vulturify AMC right out of existence.

Mitt would do it in someone else’s heartbeat, as his is undetectable by medical science.

Can you imagine trying to run American (Can I borrow a cup of GM’s old engines?) Motors! The company which was able to spend upwards of $25k every year to redesign its models. The company which was forced to dangle 0% financing in front of the buying public during several years of the 1970s.